The Wing-Friends and Other Books

In Blogger's slideshows images are greatly reduced, so lose much of their impact. And captions added to them in Picasa Albums vanish, so the images shown above are: the Milky Way, the Orion Nebula, Earth, Earth with New Zealand circled, New Zealand, Auckland & the Hauraki Gulf, Waiheke Island, some native NZ forest, a Fantail and chicks, various doves, etc.

My book The Wing-Friendsis an imaginative tale of a small brave boy, a magical adventure, a magnificent Pegasus and the wonderful Kingdom of the Pegasi. It has been given very good reviews, and virtually every reader on Goodreads has so far awarded it five stars. It is available here. Some of my other writings are available as e-books, such as The Lower Deck,which is an over-the-top take on Waiheke happenings--sort of.

Wednesday, 4 December 2013

There is language and langwedge. Language is talking to people or with them. Talking to them is good; talking with them is best. Making wedges between them is bad. Driving foul wedges into them is worst.

Talking with people not only strives to communicate--to be heard and listened to and understood--it also strives to please. It strives to use language in a way that gives pleasure, and therefore uses it with care, and
thus shows that the speaker cares about the listener.

That is the heights. The worst depths are what Tolkien called Black Speech. English is the greatest language that has ever existed on Earth. It has hundreds of thousands of good words. Filling one's mouth and other people's ears with constant repetitions of a few foul ones says to the hearers, 'I care nothing for you, you are only a toilet, I want to fill you with verbal sewage. You are only worth being psychologically abused, I am the one to do it, and I shall do it. For I am superior to you, I am worth more than you, I have the right to make a toilet of you, I have the right to violate you with my excrement, and you have no right to deny me.'

It is regrettable that although using such language in or within hearing of a public place has long been illegal in New Zealand, it is a law hardly ever invoked, and that the abuse remains rampant. Most of it is psychological sexual abuse, because the words are black words for the parts of our bodies that make us male and female and and mark us such. Denigrating them in the most vile way is the same under the heading of gender as calling an African a nigger under the heading of race. 'Nigger' is psychological racial abuse; four-letter words are psychological sexual abuse.

Unfortunately most of that abuse is hurled at men. Even the word that on the surface applies only to women is usually used of men by men; for it is the ultimate abuse: it says that a man does not have the mark of manhood. When used of a woman it says that that is all she is, that it is has only the value of abuse, and that she should be treated accordingly.

'Those to whom evil is done do evil in return.' Small wonder that there is so much retaliatory abuse in visual and physical forms.

About Me

My Christian name is pronounced 'noble-arn-jillo' (i.e., both o's are long, so the first two syllables rhyme with 'noble' not 'hobble'--yes, I know that's obvious, because there's only one 'b' between the 'o' and the 'i', but some people seem to see two b's, hence the English lesson). My surname is pronounced kerra-marliss. I was born, bred and educated in New Zealand, except for an international systems-engineer's course in San Antonio, Texas. I am born-again Christian, a thinker with a very practical turn of mind, a scientist with a particular interest in planet-friendly energy and neuroscience, an engineer (mechanical, industrial and IT systems), an inventor, a Member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a writer and poet, a naturist, a designer in different fields, an arranger and composer of symphonic music, a multi-award-winning IT journalist, a photographer, and a practitioner at various times in other hands-on fields including building, metalwork, woodwork, stained-glass and landscaping.